“I’m not intimidated by going on eBay, but I don’t know how to sell, and PayPal is another deterrent,” she said.

But the San Jose resident lucked out after hearing about eBay’s new pilot program on the radio.

The program offered to send an eBay employee to her home to pick up the items and deliver them to an expert, who would attempt to sell them — for a cut of the proceeds.

“I can’t tell you how fabulous this is. You never know what’s going to sell, but you might as well try,” said Weber, who was visited by two eBay employees in December.

The program is one of several pilots that eBay is experimenting with as it tries to figure out ways to connect with consumers locally by having a physical presence, rather than conducting everything anonymously over the Internet.

Last month, I got a close look at the pick-up service as well as a similar pilot that allowed people to drop off clothing and small consumer electronics at a mall. The two trials are being conducted in a small number of markets for a limited period of time, but could be expanded if successful.

A third pilot that falls into the local category is something called eBay Now, a same-day delivery service that is being tested in San Francisco and parts of New York City. The program allows users to place orders at major stores, like Macy’s or Toys “R” Us, from a mobile phone and have them delivered to their door within a couple of hours.

Last month, I met briefly with Vikram Singh, director of eBay’s consumer business, who is heading up the pick-up program, and with Amanda Thomas, the director of new business pilots at eBay, who is leading the drop-off centers, to get the scoop on both programs.

Both Singh and Thomas said the trials have been great for introducing eBay to new customers. But what stood out about both programs was how little risk eBay was taking on their end for conducting them. While it must pay for some infrastructure, like the drivers, vans and mall kiosks, there’s no fear that eBay will end up with inventory it doesn’t want. For both trials, eBay is tapping into its network of selling assistants, who are registered with eBay to sell items for a fee.

In Weber’s case, her items were picked up by two eBay employees, who took careful inventory of every plate and serving dish before delivering the items off to a selling assistant.

Once the item is logged by eBay, it is then up to the seller to come up with a fair price to get the item sold, keeping in mind that the pick-up program takes a 25 percent cut. In the future, Singh expected to experiment with charging a fee for the pick-up service, as well, to see if consumers would still be interested.

Singh said of the 70 pick-ups conducted by mid-December, no one had questioned the cut. He said he has also been happy with the quality of items being picked up, except that there have been too many books.

If the items don’t sell, the owner can either choose to donate them or have them returned to their home. The owners receive payment in the form of a printed check or via Paypal within three weeks of the items being picked up.

The mall pilot worked a little differently.

During the trial, consumers were invited to drop off a bag of used clothing or small electronics for evaluation while they shopped. When they returned, a registered seller would offer a set price for the entire bag. The consumer could either accept the offer and receive payment via PayPal, or choose to list the items on eBay using their own account.

If they opted to sell the items themselves, the registered sellers on site would provide advice on how to price the items and how to list them to get the most attention.

For instance, a seller told me the best way to sell something was to use every character allowed in the headline to describe an object. For instance, some of the keywords to describe the navy blazer in the photo on the left included navy, peacoat, blazer, new and buttons. Within just a few minutes, she draped the blazer over a mannequin, snapped a photo of it using an iPad and had it listed for sale.

Thomas said during the first week, of the 2,000 people who stopped by the booth, 30 to 40 percent were new to eBay. The pilot operated out of a mall in San Jose between Nov. 26 and Dec. 25.

In a separate interview, Devin Wenig, eBay’s president of global marketplaces, said the experiments are focused on keeping eBay competitive — against large commerce companies like Amazon, as well as against start-ups that are constantly entering the space.

By being proactive about getting new sources of inventory, it ensures that eBay has a good selection of items for sale, not just the items from people who have sold on eBay before. A key component of eBay’s success is to list both used and new items side by side to give consumers the most choices, he said.

“We have 350 million items for sale, which is nine times larger than Amazon,” Wenig said. “That wouldn’t be the case if we separated out the two businesses.”

Wenig said he plans to use the pick-up service to sell a number of lawn ornaments that came with his home, which he doesn’t personally care for. Listing them on eBay and being responsible for shipping, however, seemed like a burden. Getting them out of his garage, however, is something he’s definitely interested in.

“People make their living on eBay and that feels good, but to be the belle of the ball, we have to step it up. We can’t get complacent,” he said. “We have to move faster and innovate at a quicker pace.”

The media company is launching the formal sales process as it prepares to spin-off its publishing and journalism assets from faster-growing media and entertainment businesses, in a split that has raised questions about where IGN would fit in the new structure.

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The struggling photography pioneer, which for the past year has been gearing up to sell off some 1,100 patents as part of its effort to emerge from bankruptcy, said Thursday that it may not sell some — or all — of them, after all.

“[Kodak] has not reached a determination or agreement to sell the digital imaging patent portfolio, and may retain all or parts of it as a source of creditor recoveries in lieu of a sale if it concludes that doing so is in the best interests of the estate,” the company said in a statement.

Coming as it does on the ninth day of a patent auction that was originally scheduled to end this past Monday, Kodak’s statement suggests that the process is not going as well as it had hoped.

And, indeed, sources familiar with the auction say that bids for Kodak’s digital imaging patent portfolio thus far have come in below the $2 billion the company has been angling for. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that initial bids from the two consortiums favored to win the auction — one led by Apple, the other by Google — were only about $500 million.

How much the bids have risen since then, if they’ve risen at all, isn’t clear. Kodak says it continues to have “active discussions” with potential patent buyers, and it has extended the auction in light of them. But the company clearly hasn’t yet managed to incite the sort of Nortel-style bidding-war blowout for which it had hoped. And now, with rival bidders mulling alliances that would keep bids on the portfolio low, Kodak may have lost its chance to do so.

All the bids received for Kodak’s portfolio of 1,100 digital patents thus far were significantly below $500 million, as consortiums that include Apple Inc. and Google Inc. declined to engage in the sort of spirited bidding that drove up prices in an auction of Nortel Networks Inc. patents a year ago, the people said.

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Kodak received two bids from investor groups pitting Silicon Valley giants Apple Inc. and Google Inc. against each other ahead of an auction set for Wednesday, people familiar with the process said. The bids from the two teams came in around $150 million to $250 million, the people said.

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Buyout firms KKR & Co. and TPG are among at least five bidders that remain interested in privately-owned Getty, these people said. The Seattle-based photo agency distributes stock photographs, video footage and digital images to media and other organizations around the world.

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Much of the media that hyped Facebook’s public offering to the high heavens is now busy slapping it and its stock upside its social-networking head. (Riddle me this: Why did none of the breathless pre-IPO pricing stories at the time question said high share price or note there were worries, with some going as far as saying that the transaction had gone off “without a reported glitch so far”?)

Facebook shares are down 29 percent since its mid-May offering.

In any case, amid much anecdotal proof that start-up valuations might be starting to suffer from the Facebook effect, that has not been the case with already public tech companies.

Shares of most — although not all — have been up smartly since the beginning of the year, with some major laggards and some racing far ahead.

Here’s the breakdown so far, which is interesting to consider:

Internet content portal AOL is up almost 78 percent year to date, although it has risen only about 3 percent in the last month. The reason probably lies between its patent sale and better results — and the fact that it just could not fall more.

Search giant Google, on the other hand, is down more than 6 percent over the last month, and 12 percent since the beginning of the year. The reasons? Concerns over its last earnings report, concerns over a federal investigation, concerns over it getting jacked from Apple’s iPhone mapping. Everyone is very concerned, apparently.

Concerns not shared about business networking site LinkedIn, which is up close to 50 percent in that time frame. Still, perhaps due to some profit-taking and spillover worries about Facebook, it has seen its shares dropping 12 percent over the last four weeks.

Also sick with Facebook fever (and not the good kind) is gaming site Zynga, which is down 26 percent in the last month; its stock performance since the beginning of the year has been even worse, dropping by 41 percent.

That’s not as bad as Groupon, whose shares have declined 50 percent since January. Still, in what appears to be some stabilization, the stock of the daily deals site has risen close to 4.5 percent in the last 30 days.

Also getting a nice bounce after a period of decline are the shares of content maker Demand Media, which is up 6.5 percent for the month, and close to 36 percent for the year.

So, too, retailer Amazon, which is up 25 percent in the year to date, but down about 5 percent in the last month.

Microsoft is also off this month, down more than 7 percent, but the software giant’s year-to-date record is a strong rise of 11.3 percent.

The shares of auction company eBay are also up smartly, by 35 percent for the year, and only a half-percent for the month.

Typically strong Apple shares are up 41 percent since the beginning of the year, but only 5 percent in the last month.

That leaves Yahoo, whose shares have moved under 1 percent in the last month, and are down 5 percent for the year. Executive turmoil and worries about the Silicon Valley Internet company’s advertising business lead the investor ennui here.

In this case, at least, you can’t blame Facebook.

In after-hours trading, the stock was up 7.3 percent, or $2.63, to trade at $38.50 a share, exceeding its 52-week high.

The company said first quarter revenues totaled $3.3 billion, an increase of 29 percent year over year. For the same period, net income totaled $570 million, increasing 20 percent.

EBay attributed the strong results to momentum in its traditional marketplaces business, PayPal and the recently acquired GSI Commerce division. (See below for notes from the earnings call.)

In a statement, CEO John Donahoe said: “We believe that innovation in retail today is technology driven, and consumers are embracing smarter, easier, better ways to shop. We are enabling commerce in this new retail environment, supporting and partnering with sellers of all sizes and giving consumers worldwide the ability to shop anytime, anywhere, for whatever they want.”

The results trump both what analysts had been expecting and what the company was estimating internally.

Analysts, on average, had expected eBay to report earnings of 52 cents per share on revenue of $3.15 billion, according to a poll by FactSet. Those expectations were on the high side of eBay’s own forecast, which was estimating revenue in the range of $3.05 million to $3.15 million, with earnings per share of 50 cents to 51 cents.

When forecasting, companies and analysts use non-GAAP earnings per share, which exclude some extraordinary expenses. On a non-GAAP basis, eBay reported net income of $725 million, or 55 cents a share.

Here’s a breakdown of how the three units performed:

• Marketplaces

The division, which includes both its auction and full-priced merchandise, saw gross merchandise volume increase 12 percent year over year to $16 billion. In particular, its fixed-priced business grew 18 percent.

• PayPal

PayPal revenue increased 32 percent year over year to $1.3 billion, driven by increased penetration on eBay as well as more merchant adoption.

• GSI Commerce

The GSI business, which was acquired last year and provides services to third-party retailers, generated $715 million in merchandise sales, up 26 percent over the same period a year earlier.

In Q2, the company expects revenues to continue to grow in the range of $3.25 billion to $3.35 billion. It said earnings per share for the same period would range between 49 cents and 51 cents a share. Non-GAAP earnings would range between 53 cents and 55 cents.

The company also raised full-year guidance, saying that it expects revenues in the range of $13.8 to $14.1 billion, with GAAP earnings per share of $1.91 to $1.96.

Notes from the Conference Call:

• EBay’s CEO John Donahoe joins the call, and is very happy to report that all of eBay’s businesses are performing well.
• PayPal has opportunities online, on the mobile phone and, increasingly, offline. Donahoe noted that half of the payments division’s revenue came from outside the U.S. PayPal is being used for 76 percent of purchases on eBay, which achieves the company’s 2013 goal.
• Donahoe wants to talk about innovation: PayPal is now available in 2,000 stores around the country by swiping a PayPal card or entering a mobile phone number and PIN. “We have signed contracts with several additional retailers and will deploy over the next year,” he said.
• Donahoe brags that PayPal Here, which competes directly with Square, just launched and is already available globally (unlike Square).
• Donahoe addresses the executive shake-up at PayPal. It included the exit of former President Scott Thompson and head of product, Sam Shrauger, to Yahoo. David Marcus is the new president.
• The company’s marketplaces business is also growing, jumping 22 percent year over year, which Donahoe notes is faster than the e-commerce category overall.  StubHub, the company’s ticket marketplace, also launched in the U.K.
• And now, updates from GSI Commerce and X.commerce, the two divisions that are delivering services to retailers. They are also doing well! X.commerce, which is the newest, launched 2,000 new apps for retailers during the quarter.
• In summary, Donahoe is pleased!
• CFO Bob Swan is now giving a deadly boring recounting of the finances, despite the company’s stellar results.
• EBay is increasing full-year guidance by $100 million on the top line and 5 cents on the bottom line.
• In summary, Swan says he’s excited!
• Now for the Q&A.
• First question is about Home Depot and the rollout of payments to other retailers (of course, because it’s the sexy new thing …). Donahoe is very excited about it because it expands the opportunity for PayPal tremendously. He admits that consumers aren’t really using it because there’s been no advertising. In May, they’ll change that and try to get more engagement. In the interim, it is also working with other retailers, and in the second half of the year, they’ll be launching those as a way to test and learn. “I feel good about our progress,” he said. “We’ll be ready in 2013 and 2014 to roll out in new categories and internationally.”
• Surprisingly good question from analyst: Will banks make eBay pay more for accounts tied to checking accounts in the future? The answer: They don’t worry about it and the Fed sets the rates. “We do not expect the Fed to make any changes to rates. If anything, we would expect the trend of going down to continue.” They also think they can use PayPal’s scale to get really competitive rates, and they have four more years left on the contract. In the worst-case scenario, even if its costs went up 5x, it’s less than a point of operating margin on PayPal, but they don’t expect that to happen.
• Why is marketplaces doing better? Donahoe says customer retention is up, and over the past six months, they’ve been marketing. Active buyer growth is up 9.5 percent in core marketplaces business.
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120418/ebays-stock-jumps-thanks-to-double-digit-revenue-gains/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111228/one-start-ups-adventure-in-figuring-out-the-price-of-a-used-chair/ http://allthingsd.com/20111228/one-start-ups-adventure-in-figuring-out-the-price-of-a-used-chair/#comments Wed, 28 Dec 2011 14:00:25 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=157506 Priceonomics, a small company that aspires to be the Kelley Blue Book for everything, tells the tale of how it sold four used Aeron chairs to another tech start-up, for a profit of $300.



The Priceonomics Web site, which officially launched on Dec. 21, is aimed at helping sellers and buyers determine the best price for used bikes, cars, phones, TVs and other items, so no one gets ripped off.

But rather than explaining what it does in a press release, Priceonomics wrote an entertaining blog post, entitled “Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage,” detailing its experiments with selling the expensive Herman Miller office furniture in San Francisco.

Trials included finding buyers among its start-up incubator classmates, finding the chairs on Craigslist, borrowing a girlfriend’s car to get them, negotiating a lower price, lugging the chairs back to the office, and then almost losing the sale in the end, when the seller’s $1,800 check didn’t go through.

Priceonomics concludes that a business based on hauling used furniture around won’t scale but that there is a need for a centralized location for pricing information.

From its blog post:

“It’s unlikely Priceonomics could build a massively successful business arbitraging used goods if we have to take possession of them. However, it was clear that having our price guides were really helpful for identifying what were the good deals on Craigslist and how much to pay for them. So for now, we’ll just stick to building better price guides to help other people buy things on Craiglist, eBay, and other emerging marketplaces like Zaarly and TaskRabbit.”

Priceonomics may be on to something here.

Not too long ago, one way to determine the fair value of an item on the Internet was through an online auction. EBay became wildly popular as an easy way for total strangers to agree on a price for an item. More recently, auctions have become less relevant, and even eBay is decreasing the alliance of used items on its site.

That’s due in large part to today’s free flow of information on the Internet, which makes pricing more transparent. After all, you can just Google it.

Still, determining the price of an item can be time-consuming. To get a good sense of the fair value, you have to cross-check prices on a handful of sites — if not a dozen.

Priceonomics’ price guide promises to help users easily find out if they are getting a good deal, by comparing items across eBay, Craigslist and even full-priced retailers that might be offering a deal.

So, how much is a second-hand Aeron chair worth?

In the end, Priceonomics says, the chairs resell for $400 to $600 in San Francisco. The company was able to acquire four, for $375 each; it then turned around and unloaded them for $1,800, representing a $300 profit.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111228/one-start-ups-adventure-in-figuring-out-the-price-of-a-used-chair/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110720/ebay-commercials-coming-to-let-you-know-its-not-your-mother%e2%80%99s-ebay-anymore/ http://allthingsd.com/20110720/ebay-commercials-coming-to-let-you-know-its-not-your-mother%e2%80%99s-ebay-anymore/#comments Thu, 21 Jul 2011 00:19:52 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=100849 EBay is kicking off a TV campaign in the next couple of months that is expected to help bring back consumers who may not have purchased anything on the site since the retailer was focused exclusively on auctioning off used goods.

The commercials, which will start running in the third and fourth quarters in the U.S. and Europe, will be designed to raise awareness around the brand, which has been a little overshadowed recently by PayPal, which has been considered to have larger growth prospects.

In an interview, eBay’s CEO John Donahoe told me that for the past few years, the company has been focused on improving the user experience, and when they saw a pick-up in spending from its current user base, it would begin to increase marketing.

It’s hit that inflection point, he said. ”It’s not your mother’s eBay anymore.”

While Donahoe promised that won’t be the company’s new tagline, he said the campaign will help people’s understanding of eBay. ”Seventy percent of our products are fixed price and 70 percent of our products are new items. A lot of people haven’t used it in five years, and still think that its an auction site focused on used items. We’ll use this to tell them what eBay is like,” he added.

The commercials also will be used to promote its mobile business, which is expected to hit $4 billion in revenues by the end of the year.

The San Jose-based company made the announcement in conjunction with its second-quarter financial results released today.

During the quarter, it surpassed its own expectations for the period and revised its revenue projections for the year, which now surpass most Wall Street expectations. In the first quarter, revenues totaled $2.76 billion, growing 25 percent over the same period a year earlier when revenues totaled $2.2 billion.

However, any potential lift in profits was offset by acquisition costs.

The company reported a second-quarter profit of $283 million, decreasing 31 percent over the year-ago period when it made $412 million.

The company has been on a shopping spree of its own, buying six companies in six months.

Most recently, it purchased Zong, a carrier-billing provider, for $240 million in cash. Its largest acquisition in that period was of GSI Commerce, which provides services to merchants and brands, and cost more than $3 billion. GSI Commerce will make up its third business unit after eBay and PayPal.

eBays stock price traded down 59 cents to close at $33.17 a share, before the release was sent out after normal trading hours.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110720/ebay-commercials-coming-to-let-you-know-its-not-your-mother%e2%80%99s-ebay-anymore/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110718/borders-to-shut-down/ http://allthingsd.com/20110718/borders-to-shut-down/#comments Mon, 18 Jul 2011 21:30:08 +0000 Mike Spector http://allthingsd.com/?p=99394 Borders Group Inc. said it would liquidate after the second-largest U.S. bookstore chain failed to receive any offers to save it.

Borders, which employs about 10,700 people, scrapped a bankruptcy-court auction scheduled for Tuesday amid the dearth of bids.

The chain said it will ask a judge Thursday to approve a sale to liquidators led by Hilco Merchant Resources and Gordon Brothers Group.

The liquidation of the company’s remaining 399 stores could start as soon as Friday, and the chain is expected to go out of business for good by the end of September, the company said.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110718/borders-to-shut-down/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110630/nortel-patents-go-to-group-that-includes-apple-microsoft-rim-and-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20110630/nortel-patents-go-to-group-that-includes-apple-microsoft-rim-and-more/#comments Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:48:46 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=93571 Nortel said late on Thursday that its portfolio of more than 6,000 patents has been sold for $4.5 billion to a consortium of tech companies made up of Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research In Motion and Sony.



“Following a very robust auction, we are pleased at the outcome of the auction of this extensive patent portfolio,” Nortel Chief Strategy Officer George Riedel said in a statement. “The size and dollar value for this transaction is unprecedented, as was the significant interest in the portfolio among major companies around the world.”

The winning bid requires approval of both U.S. and Canadian courts, which the company will seek at a joint hearing expected to take place on July 11. Nortel said it will work with the winning bidders in an effort to close the sale in the third quarter.

The consortium won the bidding, but a number of other players had publicly expressed interest or were believed to be interested in the patents, including one of the eventual winners — Ericsson — and Google, which had placed the initial $900 million bid to begin the auction process. Google had justified its initial bid by saying that patents are necessary given the increasingly litigious environment these days.

Google, as well as its hardware partners, face a number of lawsuits related to Android. Apple, for example, has sued HTC, while Oracle has sued Google directly and Microsoft also has claimed Android hardware infringes on its patents, suing both Motorola and Barnes and Noble.

The patents covered a broad range of areas, Nortel said, including all manner of telecommunications and networking technologies — wireless and 4G wireless, among others — as well as additional areas such as Internet search and social networking.

Even with the cash haul, Nortel said it still doesn’t expect to have any remaining value for common shareholders once it completes its bankruptcy protection hearings.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110630/nortel-patents-go-to-group-that-includes-apple-microsoft-rim-and-more/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110617/apple-and-intel-could-raise-ante-in-googles-play-for-nortel-patents/ http://allthingsd.com/20110617/apple-and-intel-could-raise-ante-in-googles-play-for-nortel-patents/#comments Fri, 17 Jun 2011 21:53:49 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=88088 Earlier this week Nortel postponed the bankruptcy auction for its collection of 6,000-plus wireless patents by seven days, citing a “significant level of interest” in them. Now the source of that interest has been identified: Intel, Ericsson AB and patent risk solutions provider RPX, who’ve all been accepted as qualified bidders in the June 27 auction.

Also qualified as a bidder: Apple, which, as AllThingsD reported back in December, has been sniffing around Nortel’s IP for months now.

With these four participating in the auction for Nortel’s portfolio, it seems almost certain Google will have to raise its $900 million “stalking-horse bid” if it hopes to prevail. Already some private equity investors are saying the final price on the patents may reach $1.5 billion if a real bidding war erupts over them.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110617/apple-and-intel-could-raise-ante-in-googles-play-for-nortel-patents/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110509/microsoft-will-announce-acquistion-of-skype-tomorrow-morning/ http://allthingsd.com/20110509/microsoft-will-announce-acquistion-of-skype-tomorrow-morning/#comments Tue, 10 May 2011 03:14:16 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=43738

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier tonight that Microsoft–in what would be its most aggressive acquisition in the digital space–was zeroing in on buying Skype for $8.5 billion all in with an assumption of the Luxembourg-based company’s debt.

Sources told BoomTown tonight that the deal for the online telephony and video communications giant is actually done and will be announced early tomorrow morning.

The purchase–which has been spearheaded in closely held negotiations by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, with an assist from Business Division CFO Amy Hood and top dealmaker Charles Songhurst–is a bold move for the software giant and its biggest acquisition in more than three decades.

The big price will give Microsoft–which has struggled in its online efforts and has lost billions of dollars for its work–a big brand name on the Web.

With Skype, which has been aggressively expanding, Microsoft will continue to lose money in its Internet efforts. Skype lost $7 million on revenue of $860 million. Operating profits, which Skype preferred to highlight, were $264 million.

And–let us not forget–Skype’s debt is $686 million. Silver lining: That’s slightly less than Microsoft’s Online Services division losses in its most recent quarter!

But, sources said, the concept is bigger than just money, including getting access to Skype’s 663 million registered users.

Skype, which had been headed bumpily toward an IPO until now, will apparently be integrated into Microsoft’s Windows Live and other online communications efforts in both the consumer and enterprise arenas, sources said.

Think Kinect connecting.

Skype has had a big-company owner before–eBay Inc. paid $2.6 billion in cash and stock for it in 2005, as a way for the auction site’s buyers and sellers to communicate.

A 70 percent stake in Skype was sold in 2009 to investors such as Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. It then valued Skype at $2.75 billion.

So, obviously, the deal is a big win for them. In addition, at the time they made their investments, Skype was a huge legal mess with lawsuits flying.

Skype has since gotten cleaned up enough to attract Microsoft.

Other suitors have looked at Skype, including Google, although acquisition interest by Facebook was very much overblown, said several sources.

Interestingly, Microsoft’s new smartphone partner Nokia also held meetings with Skype’s CEO Tony Bates, a former Cisco exec who arrived at the company last fall.

Interest in Skype by Microsoft was first reported by GigaOm’s Om Malik on Sunday.

Tune in at 5 am PT for the official press release, apparently, and lots and lots and lots of analysis of whether Microsoft paid too much for Skype.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110509/microsoft-will-announce-acquistion-of-skype-tomorrow-morning/feed/ 62 http://allthingsd.com/20110505/google-may-have-company-in-bid-for-nortels-patents/ http://allthingsd.com/20110505/google-may-have-company-in-bid-for-nortels-patents/#comments Thu, 05 May 2011 22:37:18 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=62005 Now that Nortel Networks has been given the nod to go ahead with its IP auction, new bidders are emerging for the collection of 6,000-plus wireless patents. Which means Google may have to raise its $900 million “stalking-horse bid” if it hopes to prevail in the auction. “Patent risk solutions provider” RPX recently expressed interest in the Nortel portfolio, says Bloomberg. And Research In Motion is said to be mulling a bid in the June 20 auction as well.
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110505/google-may-have-company-in-bid-for-nortels-patents/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110413/yahoo-bored-meeting-not-this-time/ http://allthingsd.com/20110413/yahoo-bored-meeting-not-this-time/#comments Wed, 13 Apr 2011 16:35:48 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42578

Today and tomorrow, Yahoo’s directors are gathering here in Silicon Valley for one of their regular meetings that take place over the course of the year.

While board meetings in general are usually pretty dull affairs–and Yahoo’s, in particular, are typically glacial ones–there is a lot on the plates of those with purview over the machinations of the long-struggling Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Here’s a primer of what might (and might not) be happening, according to sources, of course, as Yahoo continues on its quest to reinvigorate itself–a journey that is beginning to make Siddhartha’s transformation into Buddha enlightenment look speedy.

A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment on anything below, although I did run it all by them.

The U-Shaped Turnaround

At Yahoo’s recent sales meeting in San Antonio, CEO Carol Bartz went all Sesame Street on the troops, using the letter “U” as an illustration to indicate where in the cycle the company was in its turnaround.

Apparently, just on the other side of the very bottom of the letter, heading inevitably upward.

Her argument was that the company has finally cleaned up its platform mess and its confusing corporate structure, and that its display and search advertising business is now recovering nicely.



All true, except there are some other key issues, such as the slowness of the search and online advertising partnership with Microsoft to make some serious hay.

In fact, although its display business will show a definite strong recovery in Yahoo’s quarterly results next week, its search business–both in market share and revenue per search (RPS)–has, as one person close to the situation put it succintly, “fallen off the cliff.”

That’s due, in part, to getting the new system with Microsoft delivering better results, which is not happening yet (if ever!).

In this quarter, Microsoft has honored its contractual guarantees and will make up the difference–which will result in masking the magnitude of the RPS loss. It’s a worrisome trend to watch.

The Asia Situation

Yahoo and its Asian partners are still mulling over various options regarding the company’s large ownership stakes there.

What is happening with its share in China’s Alibaba Group, according to sources, is precisely nothing right now, as has been made clear in recent comments by its CEO and co-founder Jack Ma.

“If you cannot make the business cool, you have no right to be angry with me,” said Ma in an article in Forbes published this week, referring to Yahoo. “I just don’t trust them…I’ve been working with them for years, and I’m disappointed.”



Relations between Ma and Bartz, sources said, remain as bad as ever, and even the normally close one between Ma and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang is strained.

Plus, Ma told Forbes, as he has said before, Alibaba is not taking its auction site, Taobao, public–leaving Yahoo in possession of an appreciating but decidedly private asset.

Japan is a different story, with the disposition of Yahoo’s stake in Yahoo! Japan the subject of long and continuing negotiations for a while now.

While the earthquake and tsunami crisis there did slow discussions down, there is still active recent movement about a variety of cashing-out scenarios, all of which have massive tax and regulatory issues.

Without boring you with the specifics, one option is to create a tracking stock, another a spin-off of the asset and still another some sort of stock trade.

But no matter what happens, Yahoo will have to pay some sort of taxes on its 35 percent stake in Yahoo! Japan, now worth $8 billion.

But if its CFO Tim Morse–the key figure working on the deal–can pull it off, what will Yahoo do with all that money?

Acquisition Guns Blazing? Or Sputtering?

In a recent forum in Silicon Valley, one of its M&A minions said Yahoo had its “guns blazing” with regard to acquisition activity in 2011, as deliciously reported in The Wall Street Journal, despite the company’s lackluster acquisition record.

Sources said the exec had his ears soundly boxed by his managers for the dopey remarks, since Yahoo has had such a lackluster record in the arena–especially compared to others.

And, oh yes, Yahoo’s M&A head just decamped to gaming phenom Zynga.

That aside, Yahoo should be deep in the market for hot start-ups to help revive its innovative spirit, but it remains hindered by a continued reluctance by new start-ups to join it and by its reputation for being a place where entrepreneurs go to die.

That certainly could change at any time with the right execs in place, but Yahoo is competing with a plethora of more exciting companies and also a seemingly endless venture capital gusher of cash of late.



While it is the board’s job to approve acquisitions and not source them, perhaps it is its job to pressure Bartz and other execs to get off the stick and hit at least one of the targets Yahoo aims at.

Targets are plentiful in advertising, content and even social, with many start-ups playing right into a lot of arenas Yahoo needs some help.

And help it does need as talent keeps walking out the door daily, mostly to hotter prospects such as Zynga and social buying sites Groupon and LivingSocial.

There is no question it is hard for any large company to hold onto top staff when there are so many enticing bonbons out there as options, but it can be done.

One good thing: Its newish head of product Blake Irving and head of U.S. media and advertising Ross Levinsohn seem to be playing well together and are setting a tone of stability that is much needed.

Enter the Kenny

That said, there remains endless swirl, especially with key investors, about the performance of its CEO.

While she started off as a publicly in-your-face exec, Bartz has definitely stepped out of the limelight of late, as her pugnacious manner started to irritate Wall Street and others.

It was a good idea, since it has taken the focus off the lack of stock and revenue progress she had loudly promised.

Still, Yahoo shares have continued to stay locked in the mid-teens, as investors wait for some sign that Bartz’s turnaround has worked.

The entrance of its spanking new director, Akamai President David Kenny, has further increased speculation about management and board changes at Yahoo.

This is Kenny’s first board meeting, but this well-connected newbie is someone who is clearly going to rise quickly to the top of decision-making at Yahoo.

That’s because the smooth and well-liked Kenny, who also has deep advertising experience as founder of the Digitas agency, has a long relationship with Yahoo and also with Yang.

He also now has much more tech cred as a leader of one of the Internet’s most important infrastructure companies, with a ton of regular contacts with media giants, ad networks and video providers that are Akamai’s clients.



In other words, Kenny (pictured here) is the full package of ad and tech experience that would make him an obvious Yahoo CEO candidate when Bartz’s contract is up in early 2013, if not before.

He’s also the person most likely to take over for longtime BoomTown punching bag Roy Bostock as chairman of the board at some point.

None of this is happening soon, but it is clearly an interesting development.

There are other machinations, of course, from continued interest from private equity players in Yahoo, as well as a variety of takeover scenarios, each more complex than the next.

While often derided as yesterday’s news by the elite of Silicon Valley as on an inevitable downward path, those plots are there because Yahoo remains a stellar brand with consumers worldwide and an Internet property with huge traffic and a big ad business.

In other words, it’s a U that someday maybe could be a V.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110413/yahoo-bored-meeting-not-this-time/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20110325/got-any-old-ip-addresses-need-to-raise-cash-you-may-be-in-luck/ http://allthingsd.com/20110325/got-any-old-ip-addresses-need-to-raise-cash-you-may-be-in-luck/#comments Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:30:43 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=4410 Only a select few concerned with the most arcane details of the Internet’s internal plumbing were concerned when the world ran out of IPv4 addresses. These, of course, are the Internet Protocol addresses that coincide with domain names: 72.233.2.53, for example, is ours.

The fact that they’re now rare makes them valuable. In fact, Microsoft has just paid $7.5 million to buy some 666,000 addresses from the assets of the bankrupt Canadian networking company Nortel.

You may remember that the world ran out of these addresses last month when the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority handed out the last batch of the 4.5 billion or so addresses under its control. Who knew the Internet would ever need so many?

A new numbering system called IP version 6 or IPv6 is coming soon with lots more room for addresses. The theoretical number of addresses that should be available is 340 undecillion. (Yes that’s a real number, a 340 followed by 36 zeros.) That ought to be plenty of space. The problem is that it’s taking forever to get it up and running.

But in the meantime, the world is still relying upon the old-school IPv4 addresses and they’re scarce, hence valuable. Microsoft paid $11.25 each for these addresses, and it stands to reason that there are scores of companies and entities out there with blocks of addresses that are in various states of disuse. Something tells me this isn’t the last deal of this kind.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110325/got-any-old-ip-addresses-need-to-raise-cash-you-may-be-in-luck/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110315/ebay-drops-the-price-to-free-for-up-to-50-auction-listings/ http://allthingsd.com/20110315/ebay-drops-the-price-to-free-for-up-to-50-auction-listings/#comments Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:25:41 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=3589 EBay said Tuesday that for the first time ever, it is making it free to list up to 50 items a month on its auction site and that it will be free to add the “Buy it Now” option. Prices will be effective starting April 19. The promotions are designed to drive increases in both new listers and listings. Currently the prices for the service vary by the starting price of the item. If someone were listing 50 items a month at the highest price and added Buy It Now to all of them, the current cost would be $112.
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110315/ebay-drops-the-price-to-free-for-up-to-50-auction-listings/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110215/proposed-spectrum-auction-could-net-36-billion-study-finds/ http://allthingsd.com/20110215/proposed-spectrum-auction-could-net-36-billion-study-finds/#comments Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:45:35 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=3242 Last week President Obama outlined a plan to auction off a big swath of wireless spectrum currently in the hands of TV broadcasters for over-the-air programming that could be repurposed toward creating a national wireless broadband network. The president said the auctions would raise about $28 billion, which would be enough to cover the costs of the $19 billion network he’d like to build, with the remainder going toward deficit reduction.

Today the the CTIA, the wireless industry trade organization, got behind the president’s plan in a big way, and suggested that the proposed spectrum auctions could bring in billions of dollars more than the president said. Using data from 13 prior spectrum auctions as a model, the organization today released the findings of a study conducted in partnership with the Consumer Electronics Association saying that an auction of 120 MHz worth of spectrum could produce revenue in the range of $36 billion to $48 billion.

The study also found that only in the top 30 markets in the continental United States will TV stations actually have to exit certain spectrum ranges to clear up sufficient spectrum for wireless broadband. In most cases, TV broadcasters will probably be satisfied with incentive auctions that give them some portion of the proceeds raised from the auctions. In a few cases it will be trickier, and the study suggests a few options like channel-sharing and repacking. Broadcasters outside the top 30 markets should not have to give up any spectrum, the study says.

The point of the study, CTIA president Steve Largent told me, is to help nudge Congress toward passing a law that will allow the Federal Communications Commission to hold incentive auctions that can help spur TV broadcasters who currently have the licenses for the spectrum. So far, broadcasters have signaled that they’re not yet entirely willing to go along with this plan. “We think this can be relatively painless for the broadcasters, but it’s still going to take a lot of work at Congress and at the FCC to get it done,” Largent said.

That the wireless industry would be getting behind Obama’s plan is no surprise given their exploding spectrum needs for data services, so there is a bit of a grain-of-salt element to the study’s findings. However it’s also a solid signal that the wireless carriers are willing to bring serious cash to bear for spectrum, which is, generally speaking, good news for all concerned.

Broadcasters are understandably taking a cautious line. In a statement issued last week in response to Obama’s speech in Michigan, Dennis Wharton, executive vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters said, “Let’s not forget that broadcasters returned more than a quarter of TV station spectrum to the government less than two years ago, and that much of that spectrum has not yet been deployed. NAB is not against the President’s plan. We will work to ensure that incentive auctions remain truly voluntary, and that broadcasters who don’t volunteer to return spectrum–and the millions of viewers that we serve–are held harmless.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110215/proposed-spectrum-auction-could-net-36-billion-study-finds/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101213/everybody-wants-nortels-4g-patents/ http://allthingsd.com/20101213/everybody-wants-nortels-4g-patents/#comments Mon, 13 Dec 2010 11:15:10 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=54240 Nortel was once a cornerstone of the telecom industry. These days it’s little more than an estate sale, a now-bankrupt company auctioning off the valuables of a fallen titan.

Last year, Nortel sold its optical networking and carrier ethernet business to Ciena for $769 million and its wireless business to Ericsson for $1.3 billion. Soon it will sell off its patents as well, among them some thought to be essential 4G wireless technologies like Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Service Architecture Evolution (SAE).

And that IP is drawing a lot of interest from the likes of Research in Motion, Nokia, Google and Apple, none of which want to see it in the hands of a rival, particularly as 4G’s commercial availability broadens. Sources tell me all four companies are participating in the auction, and Reuters reports that final bids are due in a matter of weeks. Said one source, “Whoever buys these patents is buying a hell of an advantage.”

Reached for comment, Apple and RIM declined. Google and Nokia did not respond.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101213/everybody-wants-nortels-4g-patents/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101209/court-says-ebay-sales-of-loral-samples-breach-trademark/ http://allthingsd.com/20101209/court-says-ebay-sales-of-loral-samples-breach-trademark/#comments Thu, 09 Dec 2010 22:14:28 +0000 Frances Robinson http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=33795 EBay Inc. may have to change the way it protects L’Oréal SA’s trademarks after Europe’s highest court said Thursday that the cosmetics company can prohibit the sale on the auction site of free samples and products intended for outside Europe.

However, the European Court of Justice’s advocate general, Niilo Jaaskinen, in giving his opinion, said eBay could continue to purchase advertising keywords, including L’Oréal trademarks, in order to direct users of Internet search engines to its site.

The ECJ said L’Oréal can prohibit the sale of “testers and dramming bottles, often marked with the words ‘not for sale’… supplied without charge to the trade mark proprietor’s authorized distributors,” because they “cannot be considered as being goods put on the market with the consent of the trade mark proprietor.”

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101209/court-says-ebay-sales-of-loral-samples-breach-trademark/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101130/bing-shopping-list-review/ http://allthingsd.com/20101130/bing-shopping-list-review/#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 05:05:26 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1552 It’s official, the holiday shopping season has begun and it’s time to get serious about gift lists. This week, I took a closer look at some online services that could help you—or those shopping for you—find and buy the right gifts.

While there are many services around, I’ll just touch on a handful of them, including some that take advantage of social networking and group buying.

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, is jumping into the wish-list action this holiday season with the Bing Shopping List. Starting Wednesday, this feature lets people add items to a saved wish list by simply check-marking an on-screen box in shopping search results. Shopping search results are displayed by clicking the Shopping tab in Bing search results or by selecting Shopping on Bing.com and going from there. Once an item’s box has been checked, a small, in-browser visual of all items added to the wish list is displayed in the lower left corner of the browser window. Lists are saved between sessions, so you can close your browser and open it another time and work with the same saved list.

In addition to collecting a list of wished-for items, the Bing Shopping List lets people share those lists with their Facebook friends, giving them a chance to see and buy items from someone else’s wish list. Or people can use Bing Shopping Lists to select just a couple items, share them with the Facebook community, and ask for friends’ opinions about which product is better. Users may get feedback from friends they wouldn’t otherwise know were experts in certain areas.

A Microsoft spokesman said the impetus for this came from trends the company saw taking place on the Web—specifically, people using Facebook to solicit opinions about what to buy and to tell others what they want.

A downside to the Bing Shopping Lists is that they don’t yet offer a way to share items with only certain people, which might mean sharing a private gift with all your Facebook friends. And you can’t yet create multiple lists. A way to share items with only certain people and options for create multiple lists are on the product road map for next year, according to a company spokesman.

Speaking of social networks, Sears is taking a unique approach to the group-buying concept with Wish Together, a program launched in mid-November. With Wish Together, Sears puts at least one new item on its Facebook page (facebook.com/sears) each day. If enough people click on the item’s “Like” button before a certain time, a steep discount on the item becomes unlocked, like a diamond necklace that originally cost $285 will cost $100 at its Wish Price if it gets the required 200 “likes.” People can see the number of necessary “Likes” and time remaining (down to the second) displayed on the item’s Wish Together Facebook page.Once a Wish Together deal is unlocked, it’s available to everyone—not just those who originally “liked” it. But those who “liked” the item get an email notification from Facebook as soon as the deal is unlocked so they can buy it while supplies last.



Bing is jumping into the wish-list action this holiday season with the Bing Shopping List

The tried and true Amazon Wish List, which has been around for 11 years, can be used to add wish-list items from any website, not just Amazon.com. This works using the site’s Universal Wish List. It can be set up by dragging an “Add to Wishlist” bookmark (http://3.ly/G82n) into your browser’s bookmark bar. Then you just click the bookmark whenever you’re on the specific Web page of an item you’d like to add to your Wish List. A small pop-up menu lets users designate a specific Amazon Wish List or add their own notes about an item. Universal Wish List browser extensions, or shortcuts built right into a Web browser, are available for Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Some online retailers like ModCloth.com, save you a step by offering “Add To Amazon Wish List” buttons right on their websites. Amazon Wish Lists can be shared to friends through Facebook or Twitter using a link on the list’s webpage.

There are many Facebook apps for creating wish lists and sharing them with Facebook friends. I tried a couple apps, including a basic one called Fulfill My Wishlist (http://3.ly/3u3d). It let me search a shopping portal (that uses Google Shopping in the background) for items to add to my wish list, or let me copy and paste a link for any item to appear in my list. A notes section for each item allows room for describing details like preferred size or style. This list can be emailed to friends or viewed through the Facebook app by friends who use it.

If you’re planning to go in on buying a pricey gift with several other people, a group-gift option like eBay’s might be the right tool for you. EBay introduced its Group Gifts feature (groupgifts.ebay.com) in November. It lets several people pool their money to buy one item without one person chasing down those who owe money.

One person chooses an eBay item and selects the Buy It Now option (auction prices aren’t applicable when you need to tell the group how much they’ll definitely owe). The initiator tells the group how much he or she will pay and then shares the item with others via email, Facebook or Twitter, in hopes of getting contributions. A PayPal account is required for at least one person in the group to ultimately pay for the item, but gift contributors can chip in using credit or debit cards, and they can add their own notes to a gift.

Thanks to technology, there are many ways to direct your friends and family toward exactly what you want for the holidays, taking much of the guesswork out of giving and receiving this year.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101130/bing-shopping-list-review/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101111/viacom-to-unload-rock-band-unit/ http://allthingsd.com/20101111/viacom-to-unload-rock-band-unit/#comments Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:57:41 +0000 Sam Schechner http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32416 Viacom Inc. is telling the band to pack up and go.

The New York-based entertainment company is preparing to unload its Harmonix videogame division, maker of the popular “Rock Band” line of games.

Viacom on Thursday reported profit for the latest quarter fell 59 percent after it took $260 million in write-downs related to Harmonix, which has long been a drag on the bottom line.

Harmonix has been on the block since September, and Viacom is now in deal talks with both videogame companies and private-equity firms, according to people familiar with the matter. Viacom is expected to hold an auction, and as many as four companies might participate, one of those people said.

Viacom bought Harmonix in 2006 for $175 million, and made an additional $150 million payment in 2008 as part of the deal. But for much of that time the unit has been locked in brutal competition with rival game “Guitar Hero,” from Activision Blizzard Inc., which is roughly 60 percent-owned by Vivendi SA.

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